


Saudade

by voxane



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gansey Character Study, Gansey cuts ronan's hair and moisturizes his tattoo, Just exploration, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Ronan/Gansey NOT endgame, Voxane TM stargazing scene, alcohol mention, frustrated jerk off scene, greek myth metaphors, how not to handle grief, it's all just.....very complicated, prequel fic, set in the summer after Nialls funeral
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:48:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24222334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxane/pseuds/voxane
Summary: Gansey tried to be as kind and patient with Ronan, as much a mortal could. He couldn’t give back Ronan’s emotions like Glendower did for his life- but he could be as kingly as a high schooler could.This person hardly seemed like Ronan, though, and Gansey wasn’t sure how to handle this porcelain figure in the shape of his old friend.---A day in the summer after Naill's death. Where there were just two boys burning couches, trying to smoke stain their grief and make it unrecognizable. Neither of them knows what they're looking for, but they hope to God that they can find it in each other.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	Saudade

**Author's Note:**

> A playlist for your consideration: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0rmMGIabhwhxNR9zayKEPg?si=NZW8FVzcTa2IKfgY3amSPw
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please enjoy!

Gansey didn’t remember much about the actual events of Niall Lynch’s funeral. Funerals were a strange thing for a boy who had already died. The overbearing grief felt almost tired; Gansey had been on the macabre Merry-Go-Round of stages of grief so many times he knew the position of every miserable barb it bore. It was different, however, grieving yourself and grieving someone you loved.  
  
Gansey didn’t know much about that at all, so his somber face wasn’t ingenuine. Today he mourned Ronan Lynch’s smile; because he wasn’t sure if he’d ever see it again.  
  
Gansey yearned to clasp a hand on Ronan’s shoulder - it’d be the gentlemanly thing to do. But this Ronan seemed untouchable. He looked like a grim stranger tailored for a funeral suit, which wasn’t a shape Gansey ever conceived for Ronan. He was a lone gargoyle made of black marble, standing dutifully next to Declan. Declan wore Ronan’s same expression, a cover for something more distant, but all of his features were outlined with exhaustion. He had an arm around Matthew, whose sobbing was inaudible over the moans of bagpipes which sung Niall’s resting song.  
  
The song echoed in Gansey’s head as crowds thinned, giving their condolences to the Lynch sons until it was just the three boys clustered into a sunspot on the side of the rolling graveyard hills.  
  
Declan was motioning Matthew away to leave all this misery behind, to take their first step forward into a life without where they had to learn to be men all on their own. Declan’s military march, even slowed by ushering Matthew along with him, put miles into the feet of distance between him and statue still Ronan. He stopped when he noticed he was a brother short.  
  
“Ronan,” Declan sighed, pity and exhaustion knotted between the syllables. “Come on. It’s time to go.”  
  
Ronan didn’t say a word, but he clenched his fist and grit his teeth and every twitch of his body lit a fuse for a bomb that no Lynch had the emotional bandwidth for. Gansey wasn’t sure if this was the right thing for Ronan, or for himself. But he strode forward, placed his hand on Ronan’s shoulder.  
  
“Ronan was going to help me with the apartment today.” He smiled just the slightest bit, within the level of appropriateness for the scenario. “You wanted something to take your mind off....” There wasn’t a word in Gansey’s lexicon that he felt fit the situation. “This.”  
  
It wasn’t really a question. He knew that Ronan didn't want to be anywhere near the skeleton of a home right now. The only question was whether the hum of the machines keeping his mother on life support, or Declan playing the pragmatic stranger acting as a lawyer, banker, and overall bureaucratic cleanup crew was going to be the thing that pushed him over the edge.  
  
The question wasn’t if Ronan wanted an out, though. It was whether wanted Gansey to be his out.  
  
Ronan dragged his gaze over to Gansey, and it was the first time all day he seemed to be looking at anything rather than through it.  
  
“Yeah. I’m gonna help Gansey.” Ronan left it at that, and it was enough for Declan. He nodded and pulled Matthew in closer. 

“Let me know when you’re coming home,” He looked at Gansey as he spoke. “And call me if you need anything.”  
  
“Sure thing,” Gansey nodded back. “Likewise. Take care, be safe.”  
  
They parted ways, and Ronan didn’t say a word for the rest of the night.

* * *

  
  
Ronan slept on this awful tweed monstrosity that could only be called a sofa in concept rather than practice. And it was most of what he did for the better part of a week. He’d lay alone in the spare room with as much light as the sun would give him filtered through the plastic shades. Gansey tried to get him to eat, or go for a drive, or anything that had him upright. He soon transitioned to leaving takeout containers on the floor next to him once it was dark, and he’d come to get them in the early hours of the morning - only eaten about half the time.  
  
Gansey tried to be as kind and patient with Ronan, as much a mortal could. He couldn’t give back Ronan’s emotions like Glendower did for his life- but he could be as kingly as a high schooler could.  
  
This person hardly seemed like Ronan, though, and Gansey wasn’t sure how to handle this porcelain figure in the shape of his old friend. After the fridge was becoming too full of styrofoam boxes of uneaten meals and Gansey couldn’t stomach another bite of General Tso’s, he leaned against the arm of the couch and pleaded with him.  
  
“What do you want, Ronan?”  
  
Ronan turned, sallow cheeked and red eyed, curls knotted and crushed in directions they were never meant to go. He swallowed with his mouth still pressed to a thin line, reacquainting himself with the muscles of his throat.  
  
“I want,” the words all jagged edged and awkward shaped from his sandpaper throat. “To sleep on a goddamn bed.”  
  
And Gansey couldn’t help but smile, satisfied. Ronan blinked a few times, as if it was something so ludicrous that even his delirious sleep deprived mind couldn’t conjure it.  
  
“Then I suppose we’ll have to get rid of the couch.”  
  


* * *

Ronan stood like a god in front of the flames. He wore his favorite hoodie, something expensive but remarkably simple, and matching black jeans. The flames painted color back into his cheeks, and he looked familiar in the way Gansey recognized him as a fellow man rather than an animated husk. 

He ordered a bucket of chicken while they lit the couch on fire, and Ronan tore into the flesh until there was nothing left but bone to toss into the pyre. Ronan had a caveman grip on the last drumstick and tossed the bucket into the fire as it lit up like a firecracker of grease. Ronan was unaware, or unimpressed with the light show as he looked right through the flames and sat beside Gansey on the only parking chock still in one piece. They sat in silence, not quite comfortable but perhaps understanding, while Gansey scrolled on his phone to figure out the best means to get a bed delivered, but Ronan told him he could handle it.  
  
“We need it tonight,” He talked with his mouth full, snarling the words around chewy fat. “We’ll drive to the mattress store in town. It’s my fucking bed, I’ll pay for it.”  
  
“Well, that settles it.” Gansey agreed, and he didn’t worry about the logistics of hauling furniture in the Camaro. He flicked the bone of a chicken wing into the pile of ash and plucked a napkin from the bag crumpled between their legs.  
  
“Could you do me a favor before we go, Dick?”  
  
Gansey looked over to Ronan, with his jaw locked and his eyes wary. Ronan said the spiteful nickname with a sour amusement. He had a wry smile twisted onto his face, and it was more emotion than he had experienced in so long it sucker punched Gansey breathless.  
  
Ronan stood up in front of the setting sun, a glowing orange brand in the watercolor sky. Gansey squinted to make Ronan out, all his features sharpened to a knife's point in the after burn. He pulled down his hood, and the light filtered through his strands of hair painted it a rich, oaky color.  
  
He turned to face Gansey, framed in a brilliant orange glow. It left Gansey’s throat dry, and Ronan reached out his hand. He was nothing but a shadow with a sun gold crown above his bowed head.  
  
He hoped Ronan couldn’t feel his pulse beating through his wrist as he grabbed his hand.  
  


* * *

  
With another bed, and all of Ronan’s hair gone, things were starting to feel normal.  
  
Well, as normal as two teenage boys living in a warehouse with barely two complete beds between them. They spent their weeks dragging out any furniture that was broken or smelled foul and burned it all in the parking lot. They slowly acquired more to replace it, not nearly as much going in as what went out. Gansey didn’t need much beyond his bare mattress, desk for his work, and bookcase for his research. Ronan eyed the shiny Mahogany tower, with books with similar age and value stuffed from side to side.  
  
“What is all this junk?” Ronan plucked a dusty fat book from the shelf, thumbing through its yellowed pages.  
  
Gansey grinned like a mother at a piano recital. He pushed up his wireframes with his index and pointer finger.  
  
“What do you know about Welsh Kings?”  
  
Gansey told the tales with the enthusiasm as if he wrote them himself. Ronan listened to every word, it was side chatter that would often swallow their evenings whole. Any lazily woven together plans completely unraveled by folklore, history, and hues of blue slowly returning to Ronan’s eyes.  
  
Soon weary starlight became their habit. Both feigned a normal sleep pattern for as long as they could muster, only conceding when Gansey would get up to piss, or Ronan to grab a beer. They’d stay up until dim daylight trading stories or theorizing the next step to Gansey’s quest. Gansey couldn’t remember how long it took for Ronan to help glue together his cardboard and popsicle model, or for him to get tired of the teasing jabs he never really meant. In the moonlight that spilled in from the lofty windows, Ronan’s features softened the slightest bit. Without his wireframes, Gansey swore he saw his old friend. He had to blink Ronan into focus and see him drenched in the moonbeam spotlight to realize it was someone else entirely. This newer, sharper Ronan had a roguish grin spread across his face. He grew two inches that summer, and his broad shoulders and taut muscles of a man ached at the seams of clothes sewn for boys. Pale and glimmering, he looked like the ghost of Niall found a home in Ronan’s skeleton.  
  
Gansey was the most aware of Ronan’s growth in the dead of night. Late enough that crickets and wind through the trees were as loud as bombs with the rest of the world unconscious.  
  
Gansey rarely slept. As loud as everything outside was, it didn’t hold a candle to all the noise inside of him. All he could do was screw his eyes closed, try to un-tense his muscles, and act out the motions of sleeping to try and trick his horse powered brain into stalling. 

It seldom worked.  
  
He tried to use his time productively, at least. Even alone in the dark with a MacBook, or pen or paper, he could theorize or organize the next step in his search for Glendower.  
  
Because it was everything.  
  
In a world where Ronan didn’t trust him with his smile but trusted him to cut his hair, Glendower was the only thing that made sense. In a younger Gansey’s world of silk napkin dinner parties in granite buildings, he felt more fraternity with Glendower than he did with his own blood.  
  
Perhaps fraternity wasn’t the right word. Camaraderie? Or something as simple as closeness.  
  
That’s probably why he jumped in his bed at the mere creak of Ronan’s door. He heaved breaths, flesh-faced, and there was no use in pretending like he hadn’t been caught.  
  
“Did I interrupt something?” Ronan cracked, his voice gravelly with sleep. He had on nothing but his cotton sleep pants hanging low on his hips.

Gansey laughed nervously. “Oh, just planning my next date with Glendower. The usual.”  
  
Ronan hummed, either the answer was satisfactory or he wasn’t listening. “Let’s go for a drive.”  
  
“Ronan, it’s 4 in the morning. Where are we gonna go?” It surprised him that it wasn’t off the table entirely. But of the very few things that made sense that Gansey could actually feel, it was the rumble of The Pig’s booming engine only matched in the timbre of Ronan’s thunder and lightning laughter.  
  
“You said we needed to get orange juice. Let’s go get some orange juice.”  
  
It wasn’t that simple. Most humans weren’t wired to just up and get the things they wanted or needed so easily. There were social mores to keep the balance right, there were laws of nature to help guide man down the right path. If it was too dark to hunt, you should rest so you can do it during the next daylight. Most stores closed at 10 pm because it was past the time anyone ‘needed’ orange juice.  
  
But neither of them were getting any sleep, and the corner store a few miles away that was open 24 hours.  
  
“Alright,” Gansey said. “Put on a shirt. Let’s get some orange juice.”  
  


* * *

  
They passed the liter container of orange juice between them as Gansey cruised through the night pitch streets. He could tell Ronan was antsy, he choked the plastic neck of the bottle between his fingertips. Even if it was in Gansey to fight the speed limit, it’d be far too reckless with virtually no sign of light.  
  
And it wasn’t like they had anywhere they were even going. They passed tree after shadowy tree, with scattered constellations of porch lights and floodlights as the only thing to guide them. So Gansey followed the trail.  
  
Ronan nudged him with the orange juice, and Gansey grabbed it and took a swig.  
  
“Where we goin’, Dick?”  
  
“Following an age old adage and letting the stars guide me.” 

“Seems stupid.”  
  
“Do you have anywhere you want to go?”  
  
Ronan sighed out of his nostrils and drank some juice. Gansey drove.  
  
The radio hissed and crackled a far away tune too muffled by static to be recognizable. Ronan sneered at it and leaned over to use both his hands to fiddle with the knobs, familiar enough with The Pig’s eccentricities and ailments to know the proper way to make it sing on key.  
  
Ronan worked his machinations with only a few muttered curse words as Gansey ascended a mountain road just thin and dim enough to raise his heartbeat, but with the safety of pavement and guardrails to keep out of any real danger.  
  
Just as the radio belted out a note as clear as the blown out speakers could let it, they pulled into a parking lot barely big enough for two vehicles. Gansey turned the headlights off but kept the motor running. He looked over to Ronan, softly lit in platinum blue light that gave his stormy eyes hues of kyanite. Gansey tore his gaze away from Ronan to see what had him so rapt, and he was swallowed whole by a sea of stars.

  
All the way up here on their lonely little mountain that life couldn’t reach, let them see the sky in all its jewel tone ombre colors. Blues and purples that bled into each other like watercolor, lit by the softly strobing stars that freckled its surface.  
  
“It’s even clearer than at the Barns.” Gansey didn’t even realize he breathed the words and barely had time to think of the weight of them. He clenched his teeth and braced for Ronan’s wildfire grief.  
  
“I-,”  
  
“Yeah,” Ronan said, and Gansey could hear the smile stretched around his words. “It is.”  
  
Bruce Springsteen crooned a raspy plea on the radio, propelled by a bouncy synth line that felt too big for the confinements of the car. Gansey instinctively wanted to turn it down or open a window, but he feared the silence as much as he feared to let the rest of the world into his car. His Camaro was their kingdom, right now, and Gansey didn’t want to share it with anyone.  
  
“Was following the stars some Glendower thing?” Ronan asked. He tried to hide his interest in a coating of sarcasm, but he didn’t have enough in him to cover his genuine interest. Gansey had to keep his lips tight as he smiled, as he didn’t want to compete for brightness with the stars.  
  
“No, It just seemed right. Like how sailors trusted Polaris to steer them in the right direction. Maybe the stars had somewhere or something for us.” Gansey dared to grin with teeth, straightening his posture. He was feeling kingly himself, even in his rumpled pajamas.  
  
“Okay, Copernicus, read the stars for me.”  
  
“Well,” Gansey rifled through his Rolodex of constellation knowledge. Luckily, most of it was still ripe in his mind from the little they grazed over in the astronomy course. He pointed his finger towards his windshield and traced a zig-zag to connect the dots. “That’s Hydra, the water snake. And that,” Gansey drew out another shape, accidentally smudging the glass. “Is Corvus, Apollo’s raven,”  
  
“Crow,” Ronan interjected with a twisted smile and his eyes still fixed on the stars.

“Beg pardon?” It rattled Gansey enough to rip his attention from the sky, and he stuttered as he tried to find his place again as if running his finger across the page of a well worn book  
  
“Corvus was a crow, not a Raven.”  
  
“It can be either, It’s essentially interchangeable in regards to Apollo’s sacred bird. Regardless, ” Gansey smiled with an amount of satisfaction. “It seems you know the story.” Maybe Ronan was paying attention in class, or maybe it was just a myth off hand that stuck with him. But whenever Ronan bested him in a battle of wits it excited him in a way that made him feel his pulse like a bassline. Ronan must’ve heard the same beat, or maybe it matched the drum machine from the song on the radio, because he smiled like he knew Gansey liked it. Like he knew Gansey wanted more.  
  
“Yeah, but I wanna hear you tell it.” 

“Alright,” Gansey nodded and pushed up his wireframes. “Corvus was asked to fetch spring water with the cup,” Gansey traced another constellation. “Crater. He was distracted by a fig tree with unripe fruit and waited days for the fruit to ripen so he could eat it. The raven knew he needed to present an alibi to Apollo for abandoning his duty, so he grasped a water snake in his talons to say the serpent blocked the spring. Apollo saw through the bird’s ruse, and cursed him with eternal thirst and threw him into the heavens.”  
  
“Seems drastic,” Ronan said, nonplussed. He swung the orange juice bottle like a pendulum, watching the last few sips make tidal waves back and forth.  
  
“The Greek gods weren’t really known for being giving and rational. They’re cautionary tales about man’s fatal flaws.” 

“So what was the bird’s ‘fatal flaw’? Fucking up once? Having the brain of a crow and getting distracted?” Ronan’s question had no teeth, and it wasn’t often they could volley without going for the jugular.  
  
“Id,” Gansey stated matter of fact. “Gluttony got in the way of his responsibilities to his Apollo and was ultimately his demise.”  
  
Ronan hummed and finished off the juice. “He lied, too. Liars always get what’s coming.”  
  
Gansey chuckled, even though it was by no means a joke, and leaned back into the bucket seat throne to drink in the night sky. Gansey felt any lightness that laughter gave him faded into the night sky, until his emotions drowned in it’s boundless blackness.  
  
“I wonder if I’ll do anything remarkable enough to turn my ashes into stardust,” Gansey murmured. He wasn’t expecting a response. It was surely nothing Ronan, nor any man could answer.  
  
“Living twice is pretty remarkable if you ask me.” Ronan had his arms folded on the dashboard, head resting on top of them rather lofty. He lowered his eyelashes, over the teal glow of the clock radio, as if he mourned Springsteen’s melancholia as it faded into a crackly ad for a local car dealership.  
  
“You know what I meant. Something I’ve done myself, by my own hands.” Gansey wanted to be so much more than a wasp’s victim corpse, or a king's wish. He wanted to be the king that gave out wishes for life. To leave his stamp on history, to give meaning to another young man’s life.  
  
How could he be anyone’s king though, when he couldn’t find his own?

Gansey draped his arms across the top of the steering wheel and laid his head down with significantly more weariness.  
  
“What if I never find him, Ronan? What if all of this is for naught?” Gansey never uttered the words aloud, to anyone. They’ve always been hidden in the shadows of his subconscious, flitting in the corner of his eyes. He couldn’t pay them any attention lest they grow into a beast that could swallow him whole.  
  
But in the creak of every musty textbook, or in the scratches of his pen on paper, there was just a whisper of a thought that he was running a fool's errand. He would have to bury himself in research, notes, and schematics so deeply he couldn’t hear it. Oust the self doubt with productivity toward his goal. It was the most logical course of action.  
  
If only it didn’t feel like he was working in circles.  
  
“If anyone can find him, it’s you Gansey.” Ronan uttered it like a prayer. If only Gansey was a religious man.  
  
“I haven't made progress in months. Maybe it’s all the ravings of a madman after all. Maybe this is just a wild goose chase to make me feel big. Or at least less small.” Gansey looked at the stars, and it was hard to feel much smaller than being a dull creature in a sea of lights.  
  
He didn’t want to cry. Crying was a feeling with a bigger punch. This- this was a full body numbness. If Gansey was hurting, he surely couldn’t feel it. 

And Ronan cuffed his shoulders, hitting him in the head with the empty juice bottle and every neuron zapped to life, and Gansey could feel his fingers and toes and heart.  
  
“Of course you made progress, dipshit.” Ronan scoffed. “The thing with finding someone is it feels like a whole lot of nothing until you have a body on your hands. Everything feels stagnant until it happens. You’re making it happen.”  
  
Despite his pitbull snarl, Gansey knew it was a guard dog front. You could see the emotions as plain and bold as a tattoo across his face. Ronan could twist his expression into something defensive and insincere, but he looked to Gansey with the same wonder he looked at Corvus in the sky. He felt Ronan look right through him, like he and discovered solar flares coursing through his veins.  
  
“Perhaps you’re onto something, Lynch.” Gansey stretched as he sat back up. “Who’d thought it’d be you of all people to keep me logical and grounded.”  
  
“Anything to stop your pity party,” Ronan yawned halfway through the word ‘party’, and the sound was so loud and odd shaped that Ganse could only recognize the word in the context of the sentence.  
  
“Let’s get home. Maybe we can get some sleep before it gets too bright out.”  
  
Ronan yawned again and Gansey took it as an agreement. Gansey started The Pig up with a bassy boom that felt intrusive to their delicate terrarium of emotions. Both the boys stretched, to crack their bones to better fit in their human form. The sky burned a bruised purple color, the sun straining to make it’s rise to greet the morning.

“Hey.” Ronan’s voice was raw.  
  
“Yeah?” Gansey kept his tone soft as if he could shatter Ronan with his words alone.  
  
“Put on Van Morrison,” before Gansey could interject. “The album my dad always played.” 

And that was enough said. At the next stoplight, Gansey fiddled with his phone, and the swell of mourning violins was as large as love.  
  
They snaked down the mountain in silence, letting The Chieftains make conversation with keys and strings.  
  
The sun crested over the hills, trickling sleepy sunlight over Henrietta. The dew covered grass glittered like the stars that had just gone to sleep, and it overwhelmed Gansey with how beautiful it was. The trees softly waved good morning around quaint houses proudly painted with labor and love of the families that lived there. It felt like this song was about Henrietta rather than a town nestled on the shores of Ireland. Gansey felt his seams bursting, so full of emotions of every size and color he had let out a shaky exhale so he wouldn’t explode.  
  
He turned to Ronan, to see if he was falling to the same ailments, and found his head lolled against the window. The sun poured through his eyelashes, casting his skin hues of bronze. Ronan, broad shouldered and chiseled jaw. With knife edge cheekbones and Niall’s roman nose. Ronan with everyman wisdom, infectious ravens laughter, and a crooked smile.

He was coming into his own, that one. This Ronan may not be the same one Gansey had first met in Henrietta, but he was one he was more than happy to call his right hand man and compatriot for life.

* * *

When Gansey’s phone glowed to life with its chipper little tune and showed Ronan’s name, it gave him emotional whiplash. He took far too long to see if his head and neck still worked in all directions, that song played on loop until it faded to silence. He was knee deep in the all consuming quiet before he even thought about peeling himself off the leather of his banker’s chair.  
  
Ronan never called him. Ronan never called capital-P-Period.  
  
The Icarus high of being _the_ one in Ronan’s world far trumped by the plummeting realization that it had to be an emergency - or at least something serious. Gansey scrambled from the rubble of anxiety and grabbed the phone just as it began to sing again.  
  
“Ronan?” He gasped, and he only then felt his heart hammering, as if it wanted to escape his rib cage.  
  
“Dick,” Ronan’s voice was slow and slippery. Gansey knew the tone and cadence from plus ones at his mother's parties, trying to excuse themselves as elegantly as one could with their heels in their hand.  
  
It was like that times 100.  
  
“You’re drunk,” Gansey realized, and it was hard to not sound taken aback.  
  
“What, you wanna fucking medal?” Ronan sneered, and Gansey wondered what his sloppy smile looked like on his flush face if he got as rosy cheeked as Naill did when he had one too many. “I need a ride.”  
  
“Where _are_ you?” Gansey knew he sounded like a pitched down version of his mother in the moment, but he did feel a step away from clutching pearls. A Ronan who has been gone for hours, who didn’t need or want to tell Gansey where he was going or why he was going and drinking himself stupid.  
  
“I’m downtown. Two blocks from Nino’s, a place called Idle Hands. It should only take you like, what, 10 minutes?”  
  
“Not all of us drive with a deathwish, Lynch. I’ll see you in twenty.”   
  
Ronan was mid complaint, but Gansey slammed his thumb on the end call button wishing it had the satisfying snap of something more analog. He ran a hand through his hair, breathed in through his nose and exhaled through his mouth.  
  
“Get it together, Gansey.” He murmured, a pitiful pep talk as he patted down his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and keys. He hustled down the wrought iron stairs with the polite speed of someone with an agenda towards his car, a beacon of bright orange against the moss and ivy skin crawling over the sun bleached brick.  
  
He felt better, sliding behind the wheel of his car. The smell of gasoline and recently oiled leather quelled the buzzing in his brain, if only slightly. Enough to look at himself in the rearview.  
  
He looked fine. You couldn’t see the panic in his eyes, and the only sign of his internal struggle was in his mussed hair. He carefully coiffed his bangs to the left and smoothed down the back and he at least looked the part of a boy who had it together.

With confidence's facade, he turned the key to a rolling whirring whine.  
  
“Oh, come on, not now,” He muttered, as he tried it again, easing on the acceleration in fear of flooding the engine, or at least that’s what he heard. He prayed and pleaded to no one in particular until The Pig roared to life, it’s mechanical pulse vibrating through Gansey’s body.  
  
“Christ,” He muttered with relief as he shifted gears like second nature to begin his journey rolling into town. He rolled down the window, even though it would ruin his hair. The cool sensation of wind on his skin to remind him how to feel was well worth the price looking as ragged as he felt.  
  
Which was troubling, that he was as shook as he was. He wasn’t sure why this felt like such a betrayal from Ronan. There was just something about him living so much without him that was, frankly, terrifying. Gansey always had room for Ronan in his world, even as it changed, and to not find the same hospitality was...  
  
It didn’t seem like Ronan. Not his Ronan. Not the Ronan that would listen to stories of high kings, and listen to him wax pathetic about his insecurities over orange juice.

But this was Ronan, or at least someone living under his skin.  
  
The radio played a song about how you can’t give love away, betrayed by bubblegum synths and it churned Gansey’s gut like it was spoiled. He wished he had a mint leaf to chew, something sharp and cold to clear his sinuses and wash the taste of cognitive dissonance off his tongue.  
  
The Pig sputtered to a stop, as Gansey clumsily parallel parked around Ronans’ vague directions. He stood in front of a small shop with a boldly outlined rose on a flag and lined with red velvet curtains and the word _TATTOO_ in curly letters peeling off the glass.  
  
Gansey’s heart sank like a stone in molasses, getting heavier with each gentle ring of the welcome chime as he pushed through the door.

Ronan laid shirtless, sprawled across some cracked vinyl bench like an ugly painting of a modern courtesan. Tom Ford sunglasses hung so low on his sculpted nose Gansey could count his eyelashes, serving no purpose other than adornment. His long arms dangled off the sides, and his hand was loosely wrapped around a crumpled paper bag, wet along the edge. The most remarkable thing and Gansey felt like there were quite a few of them already, was the ocean of skin that was Ronan’s back and the jet black thistle of claws and thorns and knots surrounded with an angry red sunburn glow.  
  
“What in God’s name,” Gansey whispered, and Ronan rose from his effortlessly statuesque pose, hissing as he got up.  
  
The hits didn’t stop, as Gansey was left slack jawed and breathless by Ronan’s bare chest, newly embellished with two silver barbells in each of his nipples. 

“Who are you,” Gansey whispered, immediately straightening his jaw to look Ronan in the eye, even though all he could think about was the metallic glint barely out of vision on his chest.  
  
Ronan smiled, slow and wicked, to bare each tooth to Gansey one by one. With his eyes masked with polarized lenses, he was nothing but war paint and a hunter's smile.  
  
“Maybe I’m Owen Glendower,” He punctuated the barb with a swig from his paper bag. Gansey’s face grew hot and numb.  
  
Could you even imagine? Regal Owen Glendower with a rusted tattoo chair as his throne. With adornments of stainless steel pierced through his flesh rather than solid gold on his head. As if this sweat-slick, shark-toothed man who reeked of stale beer had anything Gansey was looking for. This tattoo marred and tipsy beast couldn’t give Gansey closure. The audacity to take his life's work - his life itself - into some stupid joke to hurt his feelings, or make him feel small, or whatever Ronan was trying to do.  
  
He wouldn’t let it get to him. At least as far as what Ronan had to know.  
  
“I’m taking you home, let’s go,” Gansey commanded, voice nothing but diplomatic. Ronan upended his beer and crushed the skeleton of the can though it’s craft paper skin. He effortlessly tossed it across the room to a cardboard box acting as a waste bin and slid on his black muscle shirt so scant it looked like an extension of his new ink. He took his sunglasses and hooked them on the collar of his shirt, and when Gansey looked into his eyes his roiling frustrations dissipated into a confused simmer.  
  
All of Ronan’s stormy hues were dull and overcast, with tired red ivy creeping from the corners, living in a purple valley of bruising swallowing his right eye socket.  
  
“Excelsior,” He sneered, pointing Gansey’s sword right at his heart.  
  
“Onward and upward,” Gansey replied, utterly disarmed.

They drove back with the windows down, wind loud enough where they didn’t have to talk to fill the silence. Ronan put his sunglasses back on, and turned the radio loud enough to smother his heartbeat. It was some eerie sounding thing, with a bassline that was pumping blood into something Gansey surely couldn't understand. He wondered if it was a language native to Ronan, but he wasn’t going to reach out to pet the dog that already tried to bite him. Instead, he tried not to let a song about Black Celebrations bookended by Funeral Home ads shove his heart into his throat. Even if he wanted to say something to Ronan, he could barely even breathe as he choked on his heartbeat. He had never been so happy for another thrumming song to roar on the radio and let his voice off the hook.  
  
Maybe it was that frantic energy that propelled Ronan out of The Pig and up the stairs, walking faceless and empty into their home.  
  
Gansey wasn’t sure where the fault lines laid, here. He wanted answers from Ronan but he also didn’t want a Lynch tantrum magnitude 7. So he sat back at his desk over his book he still hadn’t read a word of, but at least acting as a proper fixture in their home. He tried to unknot his and Ronan’s friendship, or at least try to figure out if it was a tangle of his own missteps - or if he was agonizing over something that wasn’t even tied improperly. He had no idea how much time had passed, the sun had laid to rest and Gansey wasn’t sure how long the floodlights had been spilling brightness through his blinds. There weren’t stars in the sky quite yet, but it was always hard to see them through the 60-watt curtail of bright white LEDs.  
  
“Gansey?”  
  
And there was Ronan again, shirtless but more human. Buzz worn off and replaced with something that humbled him. Gansey was happy it was dim enough that his piercings didn’t catch the light, he really didn’t want to be caught staring. 

Not that Gansey forgot the display from earlier. There was a petulant sliver stuck in his heart that, a dark inkling that wanted to snub his nose at Ronan, maybe leave him the same way he abandoned Gansey.  
  
That wasn’t who Gansey was, though. A king doesn’t leave in a time of need. Gansey refused to let Rome burn, even if he had enough selfish anger to fuel the fire.  
  
“Yeah?” He turned around in his chair, lifting his glasses off to rub his eye with the knuckle of his pointer finger.  
  
“Can you help out with my back? I gotta lube this sucker up or I’ll molt all over the apt.”  
  
“Charming,” Gansey teased with a small smile that slid into his face like a long missing puzzle piece. “Part serpent are you now?”  
  
“Are you the crow who’s gonna let me get away?”  
  
“I always fancied myself more of a god, than one to do their bidding.”  
  
“I’ll add humility to your strong points. Come over and oil me up, Zeus. You don’t even have to buy me dinner first.”  
  
Ronan sprawled out on his stomach over the couch, cracking his back as he melted into the cushion, waggling a small tube in his hands.  
  
“Just rub this greasy shit all over it. Not a fuckton, just enough to coat it. And no need to give me a massage, this thing feels like I have a god damn 3rd degree sunburn.”  
  
From his view from the heavens, Gansey got to really take in the marks on Ronan’s back. They looked almost living with their fleshy red glow. Flowers and birds, thorns and claws, twisted together in a confounding Celtic knot. Gansey was completely ensnared. Gansey had received the tube from Ronan at some point, but he wasn’t sure how. It was as if his body was going through the motions while his mind was gripped by inky talons. He tried to bring himself into something tangible as he pooled the ointment onto his fingertips, and a shiver ran up his spine from the unexpected cold. He worked the cream delicately between his fingertips, wondering why he felt like he was taking a defibrillator to Ronan’s shoulders rather than Aquaphor. Ronan hissed and flexed his trapezius giving even more life to the floral and fauna that lived in his skin.  
  
“Bitch fuck-” He muttered, biting his lips.  
  
Gansey let his hands glide down his back, despite Ronan’s complaints.  
  
“Someone had a needle in your skin for, what, 5 hours? And you’re complaining about a little lotion?”  
  
He let his fingers drag across all the fragile, jagged lines along the toothy blackthorn leaves along the bones of Ronan’s ribcage.  
  
“8 hours.”  
  
“8 hours,” Gansey gasped, hands resting over raven wings. “Jesus, Ronan. Why?”  
  
“I got in a fight with Declan.” Ronan recited the words, muffled in the chenille fibers of the couch.  
  
Ganey made sure the surprise of Ronan’s honesty didn’t show in his touch.  
  
“Is that where you got the black eye from?” Gansey knew better than to have his tone on eggshells, it would only make Ronan’s blood boil.  
  
Ronan sorted. “He was being a dick and had it coming. Saying some dumb shit to antagonize me and I let him get under my skin.” 

So he made a thicket of everything true to him. 

Gansey thought this was the only way they could have this conversation, Gansey knelt by his side and Ronan with all the reasons in the world to avoid eye contact.  
  
“You know this is gonna make it worse, to him. He’ll berate you more.”  
  
“Fuck off dude. I’ll deal with Declan.” Ronan’s tone was all funeral flowers and cremation flames. It made Gansey’s throat tight. It was the same morbid way he wore death black as a uniform meant more for warning rather than mourning.  
  
And perhaps that’s what this chaos was.  
  
Gansey’s hands rested on the small of Ronan’s back, with Ronan’s heart blooming on his back from where his fingertips lay in the boldest and permanent way for anyone who could understand it to see.  
  
“Why.....didn’t you tell me?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”  
  
Gansey took his hands away.  
  
He tried to fish out any diplomatic buzzword from the vat of gut color emotions that left his body bloated and his headlight. Even if it wasn’t the lip service Ronan wanted, and lip service was never what Ronan wanted, he needed something to grasp that was native to him because English was an obtuse concept to him right now. All his communication tools were tied up in thorns, teeth, and claws. 

“Ronan,” his name came out a plea.  
  
“Don’t fucking start. The last thing I need is your holier than thou advice you’d give yourself.”  
  
Ronan crawled up from the couch, and Gansey felt smaller than ever sitting on his feet, knelt before this man-shaped Ronan made of ink and sinew. He gripped his shirt in his fist so tightly Gansey could see his bicep flex.  
  
“We’re nothing alike, Gansey.”  
  
Ronan didn’t scream the words, he didn’t even raise his voice. The words were a secret uttered plainly, and it sucker punched Gansey so hard he had the wind knocked out of him.

And he spent the entire time that Ronan left him to remember how to breathe. 

* * *

Ronan went missing a lot more often. Gansey missed him in daylight, starlight, and every dusk and dawn in between. Sometimes he’d leave in the middle of the night, during one of Gansey’s rare winks of sleep. Or even in broad daylight when Gansey had his nose in a book and not the reaction time until the door was slammed shut.

So Gansey would have a glass of orange juice and realize how empty he felt with it sloshing in the pit of his stomach.

The first night Gansey worked on his model Henrietta by himself, he feels as if he was the only man alive in the town. He pushes up his wireframes and keeps his hands moving to hold structures in place while roofs can dry so they can hold up on their own. He cradles the cardboard building in his hand longer than he needs to, staring at Ronan’s bedroom door all the while. Gansey shakes his head at no one, and he works on the next building.  
  
He mixes up Mountainside road and Eastside Mountain road, and he spends most of the evening undoing all the careless errors he made while his thoughts wandered to wherever he thought Ronan might be. Gansey waited as long as he could justify before crawling onto his bare mattress, cold and dewy with night air. It was light before the door creaked. Gansey pretended to be asleep.

* * *

  
Gansey never realized how loud his thoughts were until he was alone again. Time was a stricter keeper, and his internal monologue made every second of it count.  
  
Frankly, it was exhausting.  
  
Gansey was a useless king over a paper kingdom. He sat on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees and hands folded in a polite vice grip.  
  
It was 11:27 in the morning. Gansey had been awake for 33 hours. Ronan had been gone for 9.  
  
Gansey reached over to the textbook Mallory had mailed over to him, said Gansey would find it positively titillating. Gansey had tried to read the first page 13 times but was as if it was translated into another language and back again. He could read every word on the page and know it’s definition, but the sentences weren’t making any sense. He tried to clear his head of any static that might distort his cognitive processing. Even reading the words aloud Gansey could only think about how long he’d been awake and how that left his stomach sour and his head pulsing and his hands shaking.  
  
He tossed the book straight onto the cardboard model of Monmouth Manufacturing in a display of carelessness that was a perfect portrait of his absolute level of desperation in the moment.  
  
He walked as briskly as his fatigued legs would let him get away from his ugly display of petulance. He found himself at the fridge because, yes, water or orange juice would help him settle down. Something to give his body the nourishment it needed.  
  
He pried open the sticky fridge door and found a roadblock that left him dumbfounded. The Brita pitcher and the Brand X orange juice that was the only one the 7-11 stocked was always put away on the top shelf, it was the only place it’d fit. In front of it was the ruins of Ronan’s leftover beer, toppled over with the plastic 6 pack ring twisted and choked around them.  
  
Gansey swallowed a lump in his throat as he carefully moved his hands to rearrange them with the care and precision of something significantly more dire.  
  
The beer felt heavier in his hand than far beyond the capacity of its mass.  
  
This was stupid. So incredibly stupid. Gansey had drunk before: a merlot Richard Gansey the 2nd insisted that everyone needed to try at least once in their lifetime, champagne at more parties than he could count, a dram of Midleton poured by Niall Lynch that took every fiber of his being not to choke on. A single Heneiken wouldn’t hurt him.  
  
Then why did it feel like it would kill him in a brand new way?

Gansey was spared his moral Guillotine at the tremor of their front door slamming shut. He shoved the beer back on the shelf, like a kid hiding from his parents. He wasn’t sure if it was his sleep sluggish movements or getting used to time at normal speed with Ronan around, but he couldn’t even get the fridge shut before Ronan was right behind him.  
  
“Whatcha lookin’ for, Dick?” Ronan’s voice was low, raw with the same sleeplessness. Just a kind that wasn’t wasn’t as lonely.  
  
“Oh, I’m just getting some orange juice.” He didn’t have it in him to feign something greater, or lesser than what he was feeling. Gansey knew his voice couldn’t reflect his sandbag limbs, or constant hum reverberating in his skull, or the burn of acid in his gut from worry. He also couldn't bring himself to be anywhere near. Everything felt beige.  
  
He turned around as if the stormy blue of Ronan’s eyes could break through his overcast fog- but was instead pierced by an angry red mark on his neck.  
  
“Where on Earth did you get that?” Gansey muttered the words without so much as a second thought as breathing.  
  
Ronan flared his nostrils at him. It was code for _‘stand down’_ , and just the air coming out of them was the tipping point.  
  
“Where _were_ you?” Gansey didn’t yell. Ganseys’ never yelled. It was the lowest common denominator of communication for an emotion as complex as anger, or grief, or abandonment. Humans were a civilized creature, and there were civilized ways to discuss these things. 

Gansey was feeling less and less human by the second.  
  
“None of your business. Move, I want a beer.” Ronan was a stone gargoyle safeguarding something. And that in and of itself was his greatest strike on Gansey.  
  
“What has happened to you?” Gansey could feel his body shaking, like every emotion that ebbed its way from his body to trap him in his bubble of listlessness came crashing down in rival waves and it was tearing his body asunder. “You’ve been gone all night, it’s not even noon and you’re _drinking?_ God and that’s not even bringing up that thing on your neck,” at the moment, the word ‘hickey’ seemed worse than every swear word he knew. “Who did this to you?”  
  
“Would you believe me if I told you he was tall, dark, and handsome?” Ronan smiled all the way back to his canines.  
  
“Don’t try and rile me up, Ronan,” Gansey warned, to let him know he wasn’t the only carnivore under this roof.  
  
“Is anything I’m gonna say not going to get your panties in a twist?” There was something genuine in that scoff that delighted Gansey. Some cracks under Ronan’s lacquer anger that showed what he was truly made of. It was the same flicker of devilish id that made him want to drink Ronan’s beer. Something that poured fear and exhilaration in equal measure.  
  
Stay humble, Gansey. There are no spoils to this war. This is not your conquest.  
  
Though it certainly felt like a vital part of it.  
  
Exhausted from wrestling new emotions, Gansey deflated. “Do you even like....this person?”  
  
Ronan stilled, silent like they were living in the flashbangs aftermath.  
  
“You’re not going to catch it by saying _him._ ” Ronan snarled, and reached past Gansey to grab his beer, pushing Gansey’s head flat against the freezer. Gansey curled his toes against the cool linoleum, and braced his hand against the sticky accordion of rubber outlining. He could feel the heat of Ronan’s anger front his nostrils and gnarled mouth. They were close enough to share breath, and Gansey kept his jaw locked if simply so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.  
  
“That’s not-,”  
  
“Oh come off it, Dick. I know you’re clutching your pearls over the fact I’m a fucking faggot. Or is the fact I’m getting some? You ever taking some future prom queen behind the bleachers to hold her hand? Or were you extra daring and gave her a kiss on the wrist?”  
  
“Lynch,” Gansey warned, but Ronan’s smirk grew wider. He used Gansey’s flustered state to snatch a beer out of the fridge. He cracked it open and upended it in a single fluid motion, and Gansey traced the rivers of stray beer that ran down the expanse of Ronan’s neck.  
  
“Sweet dreams, Gansey Boy,” Ronan taunted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Gansey couldn’t pry his mouth open for any kind of response, teeth grit so tightly he could feel it in his ears. He swore the beaks of the ravens peeking out from Ronan’s muscle tank were agape with laughter, taking joy in his frustrations as if they were a sentient expression of Ronan’s emotions.  
  
Gansey shook his head and closed the fridge. He knew there was nothing there for him no matter how long he stared into the flicker LED inside of it.

  
When he stepped into the main room, it was pitch-dark aside from the light creeping out from Ronan’s room from his cracked door and the small alarm clock next to Gansey’s bed to count his time.  
  
Gansey could hear the vague bass beat, muffled underneath Ronan’s giant headphones. Maybe it was the pounding beat that hurdled Gansey's heart rate towards panic attack, but it was the small gasp that made it stop entirely.  
  
He held his breath and tensed every muscle in his body, taking great care to catch the soft breaths floating cloud-like over a smothered baseline. He dared to tip-toe, ever so softly, towards the lighthouse beam that was Ronan’s doorway.  
  
He didn’t dare look. He told himself it was to take the moral high ground. It wasn’t his fault he heard Ronan’s sighs and breaths through the grungy electronic beats meant to hide his voice. But to look would be a whole new invasion of privacy. Gansey told himself he was better than that.  
  
He ignored the kettlebell of truth in his stomach, heavy with fear of turning to a pillar of salt.  
  
With his ear to the crack into Ronan’s world, he could hear the music as if it was in his ear, a dirge sung passionate and yearning, scything guitars and racing electronic beats- and the unmistakable sound of skin on so fast trying to catch up.  
  
Gansey had to bite his bottom lip to keep himself quiet, blood roiling in his ears as he strained to hear Ronan’s choked gasps and any indicator where his hands were and what they were doing. Gansey didn’t need all 5 senses to complete the picture in his mind's eye. With sound alone, he was straining against his khakis.  
  
Gansey was nothing but emotions- anger, fear, lust, pain all pressurized and shaken up inside of him and he was so close to whatever would happen when it was too much for his fragile human shell.  
  
He ran as fast as one could on eggshells, quiet on the balls of his feet until he spilled into his mattress in the middle of the floor. Gansey only moved a handful of feet but he was heaving on top of his mattress, silent gasps at the graze of _anything_ against his erection. Once he’d gotten a taste, Gansey couldn’t help himself.  
  
He was losing his God-forsaken mind.  
  
He writhed in his sheets, Comforted bunching up beneath him giving him the friction he craved. Ronan couldn’t be heard anymore, Gansey wondered if he had already gotten off, or if they breathed in tandem.  
  
Gansey wondered what he was thinking of. If there was a beautiful boy who took up all his thoughts and left him a slobbering madman as well. The idea made Gansey hot with jealousy, his polo collar becoming moist with sweat as he thrust into the covers. He allowed himself one animal grunt, escaped through gnashed teeth, as he painted an image of Ronan. Something with so much life for being a mental still life, energy rolling from his deltoids through his Latissimus Dorsi, making his tattoo bloom to life curled over another specimen of a man who couldn’t help but look slight next to taut, lean Ronan.  
  
Gansey’s Ronan dragged a hand from chestnut pubic hair trailing from a slender stomach and soft, pink nipples to a slender neck and chin with wisps of soft, boyish hair. This Ronan slid his fingers into Gansey’s mouth as his arousal met with Gansey’s.  
  
Gansey’s eyes rolled back into his head, as he hid his cry deep into his pillow as he came shamefully in his pants. He rolled his hips through the waves of his orgasm, hyperventilating into 700 thread count pillows. Gansey felt guilt weighing on him, heavy enough to force his eyes shut even with the sun beaming down on him through the loft windows.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you endlessly to Thoughtsappear and Softieghost for the Beta! I could never do this without you guys. And thank you to Ashley for letting me talk your ear off about these books so much.


End file.
